The best days of the MCU may be long behind us, according to several media outlets. While it was once considered “controversial” to disparage the Marvel Cinematic Universe in any way, many pop culture journalists are taking Phase 4 to task.

The common complaints seem to be that MCU Phase 4 doesn’t feature the iconic, heavy-hitting characters of Phases 1 through 3, there is no singular “Big Bad,” the Multiverse is confusing for casual viewers and — most importantly — the entire Phase seemingly has no direction.

Ouch.

But it’s true. Most of the original six Avengers have been sidelined, killed off or replaced. No one holds a candle to Thanos as the overarching threat to the MCU. And Phase 4 does seem like a lot of filler and one-off movies without a clear, uh, endgame in sight.

Here’s a bit of what media outlets have been saying about Marvel Phase 4, particularly after Thor: Love and Thunder.

Screen Rant says it’s now okay to say that the MCU is bad, and that the franchise can no longer be blindly defended.

The less-than-positive reception of some of the more recent MCU movies has ironically made people more defensive of them, but if anything, said reception shows that it should be okay to say that MCU movies are bad. With how popular the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, it makes sense that there would be people defending it at every turn, but that sort of blind faith and refusal to listen to other points of view just make its shortcomings look even worse.

The Daily Beast says that Phase 4 of Marvel has been a “total train wreck,” albeit still financially viable… for now.

Since reaping billions with Endgame, Marvel has delivered exactly one memorable superhero spectacular—Spider-Man: No Way Home—and that was a co-production with Sony that hinged on nostalgia for pre-MCU movies. The rest have all been different shades of mid: Black Widow was undone by pointless blandness more than by the pandemic; Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was a formulaic shrug; Eternals was a dreary dud that barely felt like it existed in the same world as its franchise-mates; and Doctor Strange 2 was a Frankensteinian monster whose few flourishes were drowned out by cacophonous faux-horror and fan service-y cameos. Thor: Love and Thunder is a similar washout, an insistently jokey beast that can’t get out of its own smug way.

Worse yet, the article says the franchise has already creatively “hit the skids,” and points out the audience’s waning scores as Phase 4 drags on.

The Wrap compares the decline of the MCU to waning interest in Star Wars and Harry Potter.

But that MCU goodwill isn’t infinite, and franchises from “Star Wars” to Wizarding World have seen diminishing returns when audiences don’t feel like their recent offerings are as good as they used to be. The social media grumblings around Phase Four of the MCU haven’t made that big a dent in the films’ box office fortunes yet, but the numbers might creep down in the coming years if Marvel’s future releases don’t receive the wild excitement that “No Way Home” got.

Clearly, Disney will need to scramble to keep up the momentum of the MCU going forward. If not, we could be looking at another Star Wars scenario — a once invincible box office juggernaut, relegated to television after a few high-profile misfires.